What The Font - Font Guess In Adobe InDesign CC

So there's two ways to make this work. Neither of them are in InDesign. So, you're going to have to jump to either Typekit or Photoshop, I'll show you both.

I'm going to use Photoshop. So in Photoshop, let's all go to 'Open', and I want you to go to 'Exercise Files'. Go to '01 Spring Flyer', and there's 'Font Match 1'. Now this is just a JPEG. It could be a PDF, we don't have the font. Just want to know what that font is, maybe this one in the middle here. Grab the Selection tool, and draw a box around the font you want to pick. And then go up to 'Type', there's one in here called 'Match Font'. If you've got an earlier version of Photoshop, maybe 2015, this is not going to work. But you can see here, I selected it, it just goes off, and picks it. I know that it's Roboto Slab, because I originally picked this font but there's no physical way that Photoshop can actually pick. It's actually just going and checking in its database and seeing, and trying to match the font style.

You can see here, there's my Roboto Slab Lite, it even picked the weight, so good. Actually I think it was Roboto Slab 100 that I used. But it gives you some other options as well. How good is it? It's pretty good. If it's a photograph that you've taken with your cell phone, I find that's less useful, but if it's just a JPEG you've pulled off the internet or an image from a website, that seems to work pretty well. So let's hit 'Cancel', and let's look at another version of picking a font.

Let's jump to the Typekit website. So if we go to Typekit, and just go to the actual home page, typekit.com, or click on this little icon here. All the way back to the beginning, outside of Browse, there's this little option here. So, I can grab the 'Font Match 2', click, hold, and drag it. Give it a sec, I'll show you this, show you what it looks like. That's what it looks like, just a little snapshot. It's a JPEG, so there's no kind of like editable text. There's bits and pieces all over the place. So, in Typekit it's kind of gone through, and guessed the font. Actually I want to pick this one up here, not that font, I'm looking for this guy. So grab as much of it as you can. You might have to tidy things up in Photoshop, maybe to delete a background, or to make it a little easier for you to guess.

So 'Select a single line of text', 'Next step'. It tries to guess the words. So you can help it, you can see, it didn't get 'Healing' because of this little flourish at the top here. So I'm going to type in 'Healing' to help it out. Pretty good recognition though, let's click 'Next step'. You can see here, it's picked Lust. I know it's Lust, you know it's Lust, because we've all started using it. But it's gone through and picked Lust. Any other option it's given us? Lots of Lust, there's another one here, that's very close. And it's one that can be sent from Typekit, which is cool. Click 'Sync', and it will download. You can see, some of these ones are paid ones and some of them can be sent. Why can some be sent, and some paid? This one here, Lust Display Italic is part of your Typekit account whereas this one is not. It's still Lust, but a different font and you can go off and purchase it if you need it.

So there's two ways of deciding how to pick fonts. Now there are a couple of other services, like WhatTheFont. Go to myfonts.com/whatthefont. It's pretty much exactly like Typekit.

The last option is to use your cell phone. There is an option, there's an app that Adobe has, it's called Adobe Capture. Let's jump in here now, and take a look at it. So here I'm on my phone, I've got an Android phone. This app, the Adobe Capture one is available both on iPhone and Android. I'm going to open it up. There's a bunch of different options in here we're going to stick to Type for the moment because that's the topic we're in and hit the little '+' button down the bottom right. Now, this is me. What it's looking for is, you to find a bit of sample text. I'm using my business card. Why? Because I know the fonts, so I know if it gets it right or not. And line it up. What I found is-- that's looking right, but I'm turning that-- down the bottom left there, there is the turning the flash on. Click the button.

Awesome! So it's got it, now you need to kind of help it. Say, by dragging these corners here, not him, by dragging these corners here. I'm not going to grab both of them because-- they're the same font but different weights. I'm not going to try and confuse on purpose, I guess. I pick this one. Kick back, relax, and it picked the total right one. Embraces me. You can see, Museo Sans around it, it even picked the weight correctly. It gives you other options. There's lots of them, you can see, some of them are pretty close, right? Even though they're different fonts, they're very, very similar.

So where this gets even better is, you can click on 'Edit' on the top right and you can play around with font size. You can go through and decide on, can you see, there's the Font Style, which is basically the weight. You can decide on all the different weights you can play around with. You can play around with the tracking. Leading, actually that's what I was doing there. Tracking, you can track it in, track it out. What you're kind of doing now is you're building a Character Style that you can use in InDesign. So let's have a look at--

Let's change the text, and just look at a sample bit of text. There, now my Leading is being mixed up. I like you here now. So you can play around with this. You get the idea, right? It recognizes fonts. What's really magical is the arrow in the top right. Once I click on this one, I can create a Character Style, and give it a name. This one's going to be-- let's just say I'm going to use this for Maynooth furniture now because I love it. And I'm going to use it for, I don't know, Headings. Can't think of anything. And save it to My Library, actually I'm going to save it to my Furniture one. Click 'Save', and it's going to appear in InDesign. Magic! Then I can start using it. There's a Character Style. Too good, okay.

That's going to be it for picking fonts. Yes, we had a couple of different ways of doing it. I love this phone version, especially if you're out and about and you're like, "Oh, I love this one." "I'm just going to appropriate or steal ideas from other people." All right, let's get on to the next video.